S. Ramanathan

My grandson and I built a weather station on the terrace. He wrote the Python, I wrote the SQL, and the rain did the rest.

Dear friends, Some of you have read my long stories about the bank. This one is shorter, and happier, and I hope you will forgive an old man for being a little proud. My grandson Vignesh is fourteen. He lives with us in Chennai while his parents work in Bengaluru, and for most of last year our relationship consisted of me asking him to put his phone down and him explaining to me, very patiently, that Python is…

A retired banker's first Raspberry Pi: a weather station on my terrace in Chennai

Dear friends, I retired two years ago after 34 years in the IT department of a public sector bank. I began with punched cards, spent most of my career with COBOL, CICS and DB2, and learned Java in my fifties because the bank said so. My grandson, who is 17, informed me last year that COBOL is "basically dead" and that I should learn Python. I informed him that COBOL processed his grandmother's pension this morning.…

Dear friends, a story from 1984: a power cut, 40,000 punched cards and the word CHECKPOINT

Dear friends, My grandson tells me that nobody reads long posts any more. I have told him that I am 62 and I have time, and so, kindly, do you. This is a story from my first year in the bank, and it has a lesson at the end which I believe is still useful, although the machines have changed beyond recognition. I joined the data processing department of our bank's head office in Madras (it became Chennai only later)…